by Gal Beckerman

Surely the Cold War never produced stranger bedfellows
than Shaike Dan and General Gheorghe Marcu. Dan, a Jew from Bessarabia,
parachuted into Romania at
the close of World War II to help smuggle Jews
into Palestine, eventually
becoming an adviser to Israeli prime ministers and a critical Secret
Service operative in Eastern Europe. Marcu was a life-long Romanian
Communist and a high-ranking member in the Securitate, Romania’s
much-feared secret service. Throughout the 1970s, these two men met
monthly at Romanian embassies in Austria and Switzerland — not
dressed in trench coats on foggy evenings, but situated in offices,
chatting with the familiar banter of old business partners. Dan always
carried a suitcase (Samsonite was the preferred brand) filled with tens
of thousands of dollars. Marcu came with a list of names.

As Radu Ioanid describes it in his new book, “The
Ransom of the Jews,” Dan and Marcu were at the fulcrum of a bizarre
arrangement that lasted through most of the Cold War, wherein Israel
propped up Romania’s loopy totalitarian regime with a steady stream
of needed cash in exchange for exit visas (about $3,000 a head) to secure
the emigration of its Jewish population. A highly secretive operation
run entirely between the countries’ two intelligence agencies,
it existed on a subterranean track beneath the normal diplomatic niceties
of state visits and economic cooperation.

Slightly little more than 350,000 Jews lived in Romania
at the close of World War II — the second-largest surviving Jewish
population in Europe after the 3 million Jews inhabiting the Soviet
Union. In the immediate postwar period, a few thousand escaped to Palestine
on illegal boats arranged by Dan. But by the end of the 1940s, the Romanian
Communists started seeing dollar signs when they thought about their
Jews. These were valuable hostages now that a Jewish state might be
willing to pay a price for their emigration. And, indeed, by the end
of the 1940s, Israel was supplying the ailing Romanian oil industry
with American drills and pipes in exchange for 100,000 exit visas.

This type of bartering was also the preferred method
of Henry Jacober, a Jewish businessman based in London who, in the 1950s
and early 1960s, acted as a middleman between Romanian Jews’ relatives
— who had the money to pay for exit visas — and Marcu, who
would take down their names and make sure they got out. Instead of using
cash, the Romanians and Jacober preferred a proxy and settled on livestock.
Cows and pigs. Soon Shaike Dan learned of these dealings and took over
the operation (after getting a thumbs-up from Ben-Gurion).
By 1965, the Jewish state, working through Jacober (who took his own
cut), was funding many projects inside of Romania — chicken farms,
turkey farms and pig farms, turning out tens of thousands of animals
every year, and even a factory making Kellogg’s Corn Flakes —
all in exchange for Jewish families. The export of these products —
including, I should add, bacon and pork — produced $8 to $10 million
annually for Romania, much needed money for its cash-starved economy.

In the years after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power
in 1965, he stopped the trade in deference to his defeated Arab allies
and the post-Six Day War anti-Israel backlash (though, unlike the leaders of every other Warsaw
pact country, he did not cut diplomatic ties with Israel or sign on to the United Nations
resolution equaling Zionism with
racism). By 1969, though, Ceausescu decided to restart the trade in
Jews. He desired economic independence from a Moscow determined to turn
Romania into a simple backwater supplier of raw material. For this he
needed a steady flow of outside cash and a good relationship with the
West, as an alternative trading partner. Israel was key on both these
fronts. But he ordered the Romanian intelligence agency to, as Ioanid
writes, “shift gears from the ‘ancient age of barter’
to ‘modern foreign trade.’ He wanted ‘cold dollars.’”

Dan and Marcu then drew up what amounted to an unsigned
gentleman’s agreement that detailed the terms of the trade (which
was renewed in 1972 and then every five years thereafter until Ceausescu
and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad on Christmas Day
1989). Bucharest would receive a certain amount of cash per head depending
on the age, education, profession, employment and family status of each
prospective émigré. Ceausescu didn’t want a mass
exodus; the Jews were too valuable a commodity. So he would let them
out at a trickle, about 1,500 every year. Between 1968 and 1989, according
to Ioanid’s rough calculation, “Ceausescu sold 40,577 Jews
to Israel for $112,498,800, at a price of $2,500 and later at $3,300
per head.” And the money wasn’t the only way the Jewish
state helped Romania. Israel secured loans for Ceausescu and paid off
the interest itself. Military equipment was procured for the Romanian
army, including a Centurion tank. Ariel
Sharon, while defense minister in 1982, made a secret visit to Romania
with experts from the Israeli military and aircraft industries in order
to offer technological cooperation.

Ioanid doesn’t shy away from telling us who Ceausescu
really was — a ruthless dictator, in fact a “comrade,”
by his own estimation, with the likes of Qaddafi and Arafat,
a crusher of his own people, who maintained a strange neo-Stalinist
cult-of-personality ideology he tried to implement under the nearly
unpronounceable name Ceausism. There were deep moral consequences to
this relationship. Not only was Israel shaking hands with this devil,
but it also was giving him coal to keep his fires burning. Was the price
of propping up a totalitarian regime really worth it? Ioanid doesn’t
really tackle this question, but it is one that cuts to the heart of
Israel’s awkward position during the Cold War.

For Americans, and especially the cold warriors among
them, moral divisions during those years were fairly clear. Communist
regimes banished poets to frozen wastelands, censored books and viewed
their citizens as little more than raw material. One didn’t negotiate
with these dictators or seriously engage their ideologies. A defender
of human rights pointed out their hypocrisies, shamed them into change
and championed their dissidents.

But Israel couldn’t afford to have such principled
thoughts. Many Jews still lived beyond the Iron Curtain. And Israel
was constantly vacillating between the best tactics for getting them
out. What was more effective, quiet diplomacy or encouraging a loud,
vociferous public outcry? In 1972, when the Soviet Union tried to implement
a diploma tax that, like the Romanian one, would demand an exorbitant
price for the head of every departing Jew, Israel worked behind the
scenes to get a legislative ball rolling in the American Congress that
led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment — a powerful piece of moral
legislation that demanded communist countries improve emigration conditions
in order to attain Most Favored Nation trading status with the United
States. This was a slap in the face to the Soviets, and quite a contrary
strategy to the one the Israelis were engaged in clandestinely with
the Romanians.

So what made Romania a country worth dealing with at
this lower frequency, with suitcases bulging with dollars, and the Soviet
Union approachable only with a hammer or a bat? The smaller size of
Romania’s Jewish population, perhaps, made it easier to envision
emigration. But more likely it had to do with the nature of the two
regimes. Borderlands were few in the landscape of the Cold War (most
were peopled with guerilla armies shooting guns at each other). But
Romania was a unique case of a country within the orbit of the Soviet
Union, run by a cruel Communist dictator, but not completely closed.
Ioanid does a good job explaining this context. Ceausescu needed Israel
much more than Israel needed him (the Romanian dictator, apparently,
even had a role in leading the way to the Israel-Egypt peace talks).
The money he was receiving was too precious. And the points he earned
in the West by allowing Jews to leave were too important to him. He
also seems to have been a less ideologically committed Communist than
the Russians. The Soviets couldn’t bear the thought of Jews leaving,
because it undermined the fiction of the Soviet Union as a workers’
paradise that no one in their right mind would abandon. Ceausescu was
more concerned with achieving a racially pure Romania, and the slow
disappearance of its Jewish population only helped him reach that goal.

Can quiet diplomacy be justified, even if it helped
prolong this evil? Dan and Marcu’s relations, although morally
dubious, did open up opportunities, allowing many Jews to leave a stultifying
environment. Ioanid doesn’t want to make an objective judgment
about whether or not the sum total of this arrangement was an ultimate
good, but one senses from his narrative that, in this case, redemption
was worth the price.

Sources:Gal Beckerman is a freelance writer currently composing a history of the movement to free Jews from the Soviet Union, to be published by Houghton Mifflin.